India: Part Belated

At long last, I have returned to see that my duty has been properly fulfilled. It's almost been 6 months since I was there, so hopefully my tale does not dull you for lack of vibrant detail.

The next day in our trip was Saturday, June 18th. We woke up early, around 5 am, so that we could be driven over to Jaipur, which is a pretty historical place in early India. The drive there was a microcosm of India itself. One of the first observations I made when I got to India was that the roads are symbolic of India's attitude towards democracy. In the US, we have two directions you can drive. Forward or backward. Left or Right, if viewed from another perspective. Two strictly defined lanes, and all people are strictly in one lane or the other. In India, there are no lanes. Forwards, fifteen point two seven degrees to the left, meandering through both loosely defined suggested directions at will, other cars, people, and cattle be damned. You do what you want, and no one can do a thing about it. Functional anarchy, a true plurality of paradigms, worldviews, ways of life. None of this restrictive, narrow-minded "two party" business. More is better, right? More representative of the varied interests of a very large number of people.

The amount of traffic we dealt with, as a result of the politically sophisticated "rules of the road," was something no person from LA would want to live through. There weren't areas where you could drive fast cause there were no people. People were everywhere, just as in the old days when people would live by the river. But this was far filthier than the Nile that the Egyptians settled along. A road built maybe 50 years ago, before the British left India. Cars around the same age. Massively tan and tattooed trucks, with ink encouraging you to use your horn. There was no real infrastructure here. Literally people living in what seemed to be garages with no houses attached, on the side of the road. Mud, feces, smog, and poverty were their companions.

It was frightening to be exposed to such squalor. Frightening because the compassion you expected would well out of your heart like steam escaping a tea kettle's snout instead chose to huddle in the corner, avert its eyes, mumbling something (perhaps in a British accent) about how deplorable this all was. It (the compassion) was not brave, emphatically embracing these fellow human beings, their dignity and essential humanity respected in your emotion. It was afraid. And numb. Numb because you literally feel nothing. You're not sure if this is turtling your mind against the rush of tragedy, or just pure psychopathy. It feels horrible. To feel nothing. And then, the devilish lawyer in your mind twists it, and you mistake your guilt over feeling nothing as the compassion of the true response you had hoped for all along.

This was pretty much how I felt the whole trip. This made it extremely difficult to parse what my true response was to all that surrounded me. I could never be sure if my response was directly towards what I saw, or directly indirectly from my original lack of response. Later, when we saw more of my family, I felt the same way. It was amazing to be welcomed as family, as if I had been there all along and understood their world as well as they did. But when faced with issues that I had never really had to deal with in my childhood, like the impact that poor lifestyle, age, and the resulting poor health can have on the psyche, my compassion took the fetal position. But they loved me.

Jaipur was worse than Delhi. I was (and am) really uncomfortable with being served, or (even truly) cared for. No matter how much money I end up making, I could never see myself hiring people to cook my food (restaurants excluded), take care of my domestic things, and drive me around. If I can do it, I should, I think, to maintain a close connection with the humming hive of the real world. Something about being driven around, or generally having other people do things for you that most people do themselves just reeks of privilege. And in sight of the gross inequalities at my constant attention, I couldn't stand it. Being reminded that for no reason other than pure, unfair, omnipresent luck, I was luckier than they. And there was no reason for that. They deserved as much as I've had, and after what they've been through, more. Something about being a tourist in this context really bothers me.

In spite of the realization that tourism is the desperate gasp of oxygen reaching life starved veins, I couldn't help but feel like they would have been better off moving far away from the city, and learn to be farmers. Rely on the bounty of the land, rather than the generosity of apathetic strangers and local elites. I thought this would be a more reliable method of sustenance. This is of course an ignorant thought given the arduous life that many Indian farmers lead (read: Monsanto), but either way I didn't feel that my presence contributed towards their sustainable well-being. Their immediate and short-term well-being was abducted by my tourism. Wholly subservient to it. I wasn't sure what would or wouldn't exist there had I never visited.

We visited the castle of Jaipur, which had a classic mix of Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist architecture. This is where, again, it becomes clear that the recent notion of a strict division between these faiths is a gross oversimplification of the complex cultural exchange between them that has gone on for millenia. The castle was basically at the base of an Indian equivalent of the great wall of China. The worksmanship was incredible, a reminder of what humans can accomplish provided sufficient motivation, in spite of technological limitations.

From there we went back into our bone-chillingly air-conditioned car to grab some lunch. Throughout the trip, we avoided eating food cooked on the street, taking instead to the sorts of the places only tourists go. And it really was that way, we saw the same people eating at this place that we had seen eating at another place on the way here, 200 miles away.